Page 113 of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

Painter, laughing, sat back down. She shot him a glare, but he shrugged.

“Yumi,” he said, “Masaka being an alien isliterallythe first thing about any of this that has made sense to me.”

“I think,” Yumi said to Masaka—who evidently couldn’t see or hearPainter—“you are doing an excellent job. You’re, um, a very cute young woman.”

“We are?” Masaka said. She smiled, then stepped closer. Yumi forcibly prevented herself from backing up as the girl—thing—took her hand. “Thank you, Yumi.Thank you.Here, this is for you.” She slipped something from her pocket and handed it to Yumi. A…

A knife.

“Very good at cracking shells,” Masaka said, pointing at the hooked end. “And prying out the insides. Look, look.” She pointed at the handle. “Flowers inscribed here. Very cute.”

“Very cute,” Yumi repeated.

“Don’t tell anyone what we are, please,” Masaka said. “We are tired of people being scared of us. We are tired of wars. We like painting. Please.”

“I…won’t tell anyone,” Yumi said. “But please, we need help. You…know about what’s out in the darkness?”

“No horde,” Design said, holding up a finger, “settles on a planet without knowingeverythingabout the terrain. I’ll bet she’s been sending out…um, scouts. Little scouts. To investigate the entire place.”

Masaka looked out at the kitchens, then shut the door. “Is it important?” she asked Yumi. “As important as Design said?”

“Yes,” Yumi said. “I think it really is.”

Masaka took a deep breath. “We… I am not so paranoid as others, Design. Iamtrying to be human. To avoid the conflicts. But I have sent hordelings out. Most of the landscape beyond the cities is wasteland, enveloped in this strange Investiture. Like the slag castoffs of half-refined souls. But there are places we cannot go.”

“Cannot go?” Yumi asked, looking at Painter. “What do you mean?”

“Hard places,” Masaka explained. “Walls in the blackness, where the Investiture has become solid. Rising up high in the sky, into theatmosphere. Like columns. One vast one a few miles away. Other small ones, circles all of them, like…fortifications.”

“Around towns?” Painter asked, standing up, then waving for Yumi to say it—which she did.

“No way to tell,” Masaka said. “I can’t get through.” She wilted. “I am young. I am not so…eager as some of my kind. I don’t have the knowledge, have not gathered the power, to deal with things like this. I came here to hide.”

“It might be enough,” Yumi said, “if you draw out a little map of it, maybe? Where these places are?”

Masaka nodded, and Design went to fetch some paper.

“Towns,” Painter repeated, stepping up beside Yumi. “Those circles she found. They’re your towns!”

“It’s impossible,” Yumi said. “I’dknowif I’d been living in little enclaves inside a vast darkness. We can see all the way to the horizon!”

“The shroud can look like anything,” he said. “Design said it could fool us. And you yourself said that people from your lands rarely travel between villages because of the heat of the stone in between. So it could all be some kind of strange cover-up.”

“And you really think,” she replied, “that of the thousands upon thousands of people who live in my kingdom, none would stroll out and find one of these barriers? That a flyer would never smack into an invisible wall in the sky? You think this could have been hidden from all of us for such a long time?”

“I…” He winced at the implausibility of it all. “Yeah, all right. But I would bet you the biggest bowl of noodles you can eat that if we overlap Masaka’s map with a map of your lands, we’re going to find a correlation.”

Masaka had watched all of this with interest, but didn’t seem to find a woman talking to herself to be all that odd. When Design returnedwith a paper, Masaka knelt down with a fine brush and sketched out a large circle near one edge of it.

“Kilahito,” she said, pointing to the circle. “Where we are now.” She drew another circle of similar size across the page. “The largest of the impassable zones.” Then she drew out several other smaller circles, about a dozen. Yes…thosecouldbe the size of towns. “The other ones.”

“How accurate,” Yumi said, “are these distances you’ve drawn?”

“Hordes have incredible spatial awareness,” Design said. “Comes from having bodies that can spread out to the size of a nation. Her guess will be more accurate than most people’s instrument-measured surveys.”

“Here is a scale,” Masaka said, drawing a line at the bottom with some numbers on it. “It is exact.”

Painter knelt and studied the painting in detail, then measured the distances using his palm and fingers, something he’d taught Yumi to do for measuring parts of a painting.

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